Hannah Murray was sitting under hot lights in hotel ballrooms in New York and London in the spring of 2019, answering the same four questions about dragons for the eleventh time that day, just like the rest of the Game of Thrones cast. The program was coming to an end. The press machine was massive. In the midst of all of that, she was photographed by photographers, and one type of website noticed that she appeared different and concluded it knew why.
She had no pregnancy. She stated it quite clearly. At the time, she was a late-twenties woman who had just been released from a mental health facility and was taking a medication that has weight gain as a nearly inevitable side effect. That was unknown to anyone outside her family. Working solely with photos, the internet accepted the only explanation that seemed plausible.
You can see why that particular detail has stuck with her. She talked about realizing that pregnancy was the only socially acceptable reason for a woman in public life to get larger in an interview with Woman’s Hour in June. It’s a minor, nearly insignificant observation, but it makes a big impact. She was trying to sell a television show while reading an unwritten rulebook that most people never bother to look at.
The symmetry is what makes her case so unsettling. At the age of seventeen, she portrayed Cassie Ainsworth in the 2007 film Skins, which was about anorexia and featured a fragile, idealistic girl. Although she acknowledged having a disordered relationship with food, she has since clarified that she did not suffer from anorexia. The scrutiny was the same in either case. The criticism only shifted in direction.
Her memoir, The Make-Believe, which was released this year, told the fuller tale. It talks about something much stranger than a body-image narrative: her participation in a wellness group while filming in Detroit in 2017, whose leader she eventually came to believe had true magical abilities.
A psychotic episode, a three-week stay in an inpatient unit, and ultimately a bipolar diagnosis ensued. It is evident from reading her account of that time that the weight was never really the point, given her belief that hospital staff were the group’s leader in disguise and her conviction that she was somehow responsible for saving the world. It was only the portion that was visible.
She has been open about the fact that she was no longer able to do it after that. The performance surrounding the acting, not the acting itself. Uncomfortable in her own body, she entered a casting room looking glamorous and cheerful while carrying something she felt she had to conceal, wondering what the producers were thinking. In any case, she might have eventually moved away. The timing was just made clear by the press tour.
When asked if body-shaming is still a major issue in the industry, she was clear that anyone who says otherwise is lying. The tabloid brutality of the 1990s has changed more than it has disappeared. Now it’s quieter, lost in the algorithmic churn of celebrity aggregation sites, comment sections, and reply guys. The Instagram video of that exact interview drew the usual mix of comments, including praise from women who had obviously heard something they recognized and criticism that she was unhealthy and needed to take care of herself. It was correctly noted by someone in the replies that the remarks supported her entire claim.
She doesn’t seem interested in framing this as a tale of redemption, despite the temptation to do so. She claims that taking a step back has improved her overall wellbeing and mental health. There’s no sign of a return announcement. Just a book, a life free from the need to be photographed for a living, and a press circuit she can leave.
It’s difficult not to consider how much of this could have been prevented as you watch it happen. Not the disease. That was inevitable. But while she was quietly coping with something that none of them could see, years of strangers told her stories about her body, first as an ideal and then as a failure.
